In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity, around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g. text and/or multimedia) and a variety of data communications. The data services, for example, enable activities that often have been performed in computers, such as surfing the World Wide Web via a browser, but now from the convenience of a mobile station.
The introduction and rapid large scale adoption of smartphone type mobile stations has facilitated a still wider array of applications and services for mobile station users; and many of these applications and services involve high volume data communications. Unlimited data plans that a wireless carrier offers to its mobile station users, further, encourages data usage by these users. From the carrier's perspective high volumes of data traffic would increase its operating cost and may also lead to network congestion, reducing the ability of its network to provide all users with all of the desired services. For example, network congestion may compromise quality of voice calls.
To address concern of huge traffic volume due to data services, wireless carriers have tried to expand and upgrade their wireless network systems and to introduce usage-based data plans to economically control data traffic that goes through their networks. However, the network upgrades still cannot keep up with growth of data traffic volume. In addition, some mobile users cannot afford their communication demands under the usage-based data plans.
In addition to communication via traditional 3G and/or 4G cellular networks (or wireless Wide Area Network, or WWAN), many mobile communication devices, such as smartphones, nowadays have the capability of communicating over the Internet through different types of wireless connections, such as a wireless Local Area Network, or WLAN. A WLAN provides flexible network connectivity, making it possible for mobile data users to stay connected as they move freely within a building, around a campus, or in public hot spots (e.g. airports, hotels, and other public spaces). Wi-Fi (or sometimes WiFi) is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, which is used to describe wireless connectivity technologies for a WLAN based on the IEEE 802.11 standards.
Because of its popularity and availability in public and private points of interest, Wi-Fi is considered an alternate connectivity option by both carriers and mobile users. Use of Wi-Fi may sometimes even be preferred by both the carriers and the mobile station users. From the carrier's perspective, offload of traffic via Wi-Fi decreases use of more costly Radio Frequency (RF) resources of the cellular network by those who are still under unlimited data plan. From the mobile station user's perspective, the Wi-Fi network may offer faster data speeds compared to the 3G cellular network, and/or the use of Wi-Fi network may provide economic advantages under usage-based billing arrangement.
Decisions as to whether or not a Wi-Fi network should be used in place of 3G or 4G cellular network, however, have traditionally been made based on location, time, data content type and size, and data usage. While these approaches work well in outbound communication scenarios, they neither work well with inbound communications, nor consider the presence status of the mobile station user. For example, when a mobile station user is in an area where a Wi-Fi network is available and is actually connected to the Wi-Fi network, the carrier may still transmit an inbound video call via its cellular network, not via the Wi-Fi network to the mobile station user, even though the intended recipient may prefer Wi-Fi network for video calling, since the cellular network does not consider willingness of the mobile station user.
Thus, a need exists for selectively routing the traffic between the wireless cellular network (WWAN) and the Wi-Fi network (WLAN), in a more effective manner.